Once upon a time, cloud computing was synonymous with Salesforce.com and Amazon, and was of little consequence to network engineers. Those days are over.

Analysts predict anywhere from 30% to 80% enterprise adoption of cloud computing in the next five years -- whether it be hosted applications and data, internal cloud build-out or a hybrid model of the two. If this holds true, networking teams will be largely responsible for implementation.

So networking vendors went hog-wild marketing "cloud computing network gear" in 2009. That largely translated to 10 GigE core and access switches that could directly connect in a 2-layer switching architecture (or flat network) with decentralized application servers throughout the network.

Of course, considering the myriad of security, policy and management issues involved with cloud computing, and the fact that the networking community shied away from flat network architecture in the past, some wonder if this tech shift could fizzle. NEXT: One technology grows up ...

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